


Promises

by rellkelltn87



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Adult Themes both the fun kind and the incredibly boring kind, Hopes and Tropes, Marriage Promise, some smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-01 22:01:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20265193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rellkelltn87/pseuds/rellkelltn87
Summary: Barba and Benson forget a promise they made to each other five years ago.From a prompt suggested byawkwardspiritanimals, like, 18 hours ago.





	Promises

“Scotch tonight, hm?”

The Honorable Rafael Barba, a Manhattan family court judge, took the seat next to Lieutenant Olivia Benson’s at the bar at Forlini’s. They still met here a few times a month to catch up, except when SVU stayed on a case that had been assigned to Barba in court. 

When he was appointed a year ago, she’d thrown him a party at her place. They’d desperately needed a celebration after months of grief over Dodds and the circumstances surrounding his murder. Barba had even managed to get past his shock and unexpected heartbreak that Benson was romantically involved with the head of IAB, realizing that there were worse things in the world than Benson finding romance. 

“Ed asked me to marry him,” she said, running a finger around the rim of her glass.

“And this calls for scotch, not champagne?” 

Ever since another opportunity for her to take the captain exam had come and gone, Barba worried about her, a little.

“It’s been good, these last two years, you know, and he’s a stable presence for Noah —”

“_You_ are a stable presence for Noah,” Barba insisted, and Benson turned to him, her eyes briefly flashing something that looked like gratitude. 

“And he pulls me in a direction I probably need to be pulled in once in a while.”

“Are you trying to convince yourself of something?”

“You and I both know it’s time for me to retire.”

“Retire?” Barba said loudly.

“Shh.”

Barba flagged down the bartender and ordered himself a scotch. “You,” he said, pressing his shoulder to hers, “do not want to retire.”

“I _should_ want to retire. I’ve been held hostage five times. The psychic fallout of William Lewis will never end for me. I can retire, collect a pension, and work part time as a forensic consultant. It’s a life a lot of people would envy.”

“What about all the work you’ve done to get Manhattan SVU out of the 90s, to get justice for survivors, to change rape kit testing across the country —”

“What about Noah? What about my health?”

The bartender set a glass in front of Barba. He took a long, slow sip. “If you believe that retiring will be better for your health then by all means, that’s what you need to do.” He tilted his head to the side, catching her gaze again. “But you don’t.”

“I’m turning 50 in two weeks, Rafa.”

“That gives you fourteen more years to fix SVU.”

“Unless I’m killed on the job or die unexpectedly before then.”

“Liv,” he warned.”

“It happens.”

“So if you died unexpectedly, you’d want to be able to say that at least you retired.”

“Yes.” It was a lie. A lie to him or the both of them, he couldn’t be sure.

“So back to my original line of questioning, what’s with the scotch?”

“You’re a judge. You don’t get a _line of questioning_.”

“In which case, my ruling is that you should apply for a promotion to captain and push through your plan to restructure SVU, leaving behind a legacy of justice that will benefit thousands of people.”

“You,” she said, clutching her glass with both hands, her voice breaking into an almost-tearful whisper, “are one of only two people who’s ever told me anything like that.”

“Me and Tucker?”

“No, John Munch.”

“What does Tucker say, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“He’s been NYPD for years too, and he’s seen some of its most frightening, most unjust sides working with IAB. So when he matter-of-factly says my experiences have thrown me off, the kidnappings and hostage situations and attempted sexual assault, that they’ve made me want to push myself too hard, to be married to my career instead of wanting a quiet second act outside the city, outside SVU, he’s probably right.”

“Trust your gut, Liv,” Barba said.

“My gut is good at detective work, not family life. Never was.”

“You’re wrong,” Barba said, licking his lips before sipping his scotch again.

“I’m not.”

“Your gut has told me things about myself that I didn’t know. Your gut is good at friendship.”

She pursed her lips and her eyes sloped downward. “Fifty,” was all she said.

“Age is just a number.”

“I’m not here for clichés.” She slid a few dollars toward the bartender and grabbed her jacket and bag. “I’ve got to get home.”

“And tell Tucker what?”

Her eyes widened. “None of your business.”

“You’re my b-f-f,” he said, pronouncing the letters with a sarcastic bite, “so even if it’s not my business, I look out for you.”

Benson’s shoulders dropped, and she moved a few steps closer to Barba again. “I can look out for myself. And even if I tell him _not right now_ or _not yet_, I’m not going to break his heart. I’ve had my own heart broken enough times to know better than to break someone else’s.”

“Do what’s good for you,” Barba said.

“I don’t necessarily _know_ what’s good for me, after all the trauma —”

“The trauma means you should check in with someone before you make any major decisions. You’re checking in with me, and I’m telling you to trust your gut.”

“Sure,” she said, patting his shoulder. “I’ll see you around?”

“Call me. I have more books for Noah. Let me know when the best time is.”

“I will.” 

She walked off, and he stared into his glass, wondering if his own assessment of Benson’s situation might have been clouded by the two or so years he’d been in love with her following a brief encounter the night Alex Muñoz refused to drop out of the mayoral race even as an indictment was on the way, when they both decided (a bit drunkenly, but perhaps wisely) not to pursue anything further until there was less of a conflict of interest between them. 

Within a month, she was back with Cassidy.

After his grandmother died — Abuelita, who was always telling him to get over himself in a good way, that he should pursue his dreams of the judicial bench regardless of what he’d been told about himself — he finally put in the application, and as it turned out, she was right. Meanwhile, Benson got together with Tucker, keeping their own serious conflict of interest a secret as they worked the St. Fabiola’s case, breaking his heart from a few different angles.

He wasn’t mad at her anymore. 

But he worried that his feelings about Tucker tonight, about his insistence that Benson was best off retiring, were unfairly influenced by that old heartbreak.

“Ugh, turn that shit off,” another patron at the other end of the bar told the bartender, waving her hand in the direction of the tv, which was tuned to a cable news channel, as it often was. She flinched when she saw Barba. “Sorry, Your Honor,” she said.

He recognized her as a representative of corporate counsel, and mouthed the words _it’s fine_.

The bartender flipped to a network singing competition. “Y’know,” the counselor said to Barba and the bartender, “I heard that musicians get themselves on this show, into the top ten, and then throw their own performance so they don’t win the show’s contract.”

“Why would they do that?” the bartender asked, and as the counselor started to explain, a man in his mid-to-late twenties, sequined guitar strap slung over his shoulder, began to sing a song that Barba couldn’t recall the title of, but had been stuck in his head for weeks four or five years ago. 

He’d sung a few lines of that song to Benson, that night when the Muñozes broke his heart, a night when he and Benson finished off two bottles of wine, when they’d decided it would be too difficult for them to be together. 

But it was a different recollection from that night, one that had somehow attached itself to the song being covered by the young man on the screen above him, that punched Barba in the stomach.

A promise.

A promise that he and Benson had made to each other on that October night, a promise so long forgotten that it no longer existed in his memory, a promise preserved only in a cover song.

_If we’re both single and not working together when I’m 50, we’ll get married so everyone will shut the hell up about me being married to my job._

—

**October 2013**: 

The first bottle of wine was a lot of talk about work, the last few sips ending with Barba admitting that he should have asked the feds to take over for him and Manhattan SVU on the Muñoz case. 

Halfway through the second bottle, Benson was sitting on Barba’s living room floor, her back to the couch. They were both still dressed for work, though Barba had discarded his jacket and tie. Barba said that he didn’t want to talk about Muñoz anymore and slid down to the floor to join Benson, landing with a _thunk_ that made them both laugh.

“You poor thing,” she said, half-joking, half genuine sympathy. She ran her fingertips across the stubble on his jawline.

He smirked into his glass. “Hey, now, you’ve got a man at home.”

“Not at the moment.”

“So he’s undercover.”

“Ugh, Rafa, I don’t want to talk about Brian tonight. We are … taking a break … at the moment.”

Barba’s smirk spread into a full smile. 

“Good,” she said, “there you go.”

“I thought you didn’t date lawyers.”

“I don’t.” She laughed, hard, and poured herself another glass, flinching when she realized she’d emptied the second bottle. Quickly, she poured half the contents of her glass into Barba’s. “I _did_, twice. One ended in a conflict of interest and the other ended in her not telling me until the last minute that she wasn’t actually dead.”

She leaned towards him, resting her head on his shoulder.

He tipped his head forward to kiss her forehead near her hairline, then sang a few bars of a song she didn’t recognize.

“You should join us for karaoke sometime,” she teased.

“I don’t know what that song is called, and I don’t know any of the rest of it.”

“Are we going to need a third bottle?”

“Possibly.”

“Probably not good for our collective health, in any sense.”

Barba let out a small, whistling breath. “Whiskey steadies my nerves better.”

“Come here,” she said, even though she was practically sitting in his lap. She ran a hand through his hair, teasing his scalp with her fingertips. “You’ve had a terrible week.”

“He said … no, on second thought, I really _don’t_ want to talk about it.”

“I envy people whose relationships just end,” Benson said, a strange wistful air about her as she twirled the stem of her empty glass between her fingers. “Just _end_, and not fail spectacularly.”

“I know.” Barba wrapped his arms around her. “I know, I do.”

She set her glass on the floor. Lifting a leg and swinging it across Barba’s lap, she said, “I’ll tell you what.” 

“Hey,” he said, “are you and Cassidy really broken up?”

“Rafa.” She gripped his suspenders. He leaned his head back towards the couch, and her lips dove for his neck, the same lips breaking into a smile when Barba let out a soft reflexive moan. “Don’t you know that my wanting to use my position to make life better for survivors, to make justice happen without any old men complaining about it, without any young men complaining about it, without any women complaining about it, without _anyone_ complaining about justice, means I’m _married to my job_? I’m _married to my job_, that’s the only way anyone can understand what I do.”

“I’ll marry you to shut everybody up. I’ll marry you and then you can be a Lieutenant — a Captain, the Chief — and make SVU work the way it should.”

“Make you a deal,” Benson said.

“I rarely accept deals. I take everything to court. Costs the city a lot of money.”

Benson lightly smacked his chest with the back of her hand. “So, how about we have a little bit of fun tonight,” she said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “knowing I’m not getting caught up in another lawyer conflict of interest again, so it’s —”

“Just one night, one good night at the end of a bad week, yes.”

“And then, if we’re both single and not working together when I’m 50, we’ll get married so everyone will shut the hell up about me being married to my job.”

Barba craned his neck upward so he could kiss her lips. “It’s a deal,” he said. 

“And the rest of it?”

“Yes, sweetheart, yes.” A flush of heat washed over him. Realizing he was already too far gone for someone who was a full bottle of wine to the wind, he used his thumb to rub her through her slacks, whispering in Spanish about how much he wanted to fuck her.

“You know I understand everything you just said.” She slid his suspenders off his shoulders and started to undo his suit pants. “Everything.”

“Was counting on it.” With her blouse now fully unbuttoned, he undid the clasp on the back of her bra, lifting it before she had the chance to shrug the blouse off her shoulders, mouthing at one of her breasts, swirling his tongue around her nipple. She pressed a palm to the back of his head and drew him even closer. “C’mon, sweetheart, I want to hear you,” he told her, dipping his fingers past the waistband of her underwear, rubbing intently until she gave him what he wanted, his name, _Ra-fa-el_, moaned loud and slow. 

“More,” she commanded, and he was throbbing, _definitely_ too far gone for a forty-something who’d just downed a full bottle of wine.

Her wetness and a brief touch of her palm to his dick did him in, as if he was a man twenty-five years younger.

She kept going, bouncing on his fingers, pushing herself harder into his thumb. “Okay, okay,” she said, tapping his wrist. He removed his hand, and she buried her head in his shoulder, laughter and wine on her breath. 

“Sorry,” he said.

“No, no, don’t worry about it. You’ve got some magic fingers there, Barba. I’m okay. I promise I’m more than okay.”

“I’m going to get cleaned up,” he said, standing slowly, carefully, and shuffling off to the bathroom. 

When he returned in pajama pants and a T-shirt, Benson was mostly buttoned up again, sitting on the couch, holding her bra bunched up in one hand. Barba sat beside her, stretching his arm across the back of the couch. 

“I owe you,” he said.

“No, you don’t. You’ve had a rough week. And most men your age with a few glasses of wine in them have the opposite problem but insist we keep _trying_.” She rolled her eyes. “We can’t—”

“I’ve been told I make a pretty good —”

“If you say “oral argument” I swear to God I’ll find a third bottle of wine and pour it over your head.”

Barba grinned from ear to ear, a warm, familiar feeling rising up near his heart.

“But seriously,” she said, “let’s say now that this is the end of it. We work together, there’s a huge conflict of interest, and I made this mistake with a federal attorney before. I’m sure as hell not making it again with a city ADA.”

His heart sunk at _mistake_.

She was right, but she wouldn’t have said it so bluntly if she hadn’t polished off four glasses of wine. But she was right.

He would have to teach himself not to be in love with her. He’d done it many times before, an easier task than a starry-eyed teenager might think.

“I’ll get you a glass of water and something to sleep in,” he offered.

She nodded. 

When he returned to the living room, she was stretched out on the couch, lightly snoring, the empty glass of water on the floor next to the wine glasses. He cleaned up the mess, and his mind wandered back to earlier that afternoon, when he’d told Benson that his mother had said to stick by Alex because he’d be mayor of New York one day, how Benson saw right through him to old wounds he didn’t even remember still stuck to his soul. 

_If circumstances were a little different,_ he said to himself, _I could fall very much in love with Olivia Benson_.

—

The memory of the promise they’d made that night had been lost to Benson, too, until one afternoon when she was driving down I-80 with Tucker in the passenger seat and Noah in the back, heading out “to the country” to look at houses, which were much cheaper and had much more land attached than anything you could get in the outer boroughs or surrounding counties, things Benson supposed she should care about at this stage of her life.

She’d told Tucker that Noah was happy in his school and needed the stability of staying in one place for a few more years. Tucker reluctantly agreed, saying he absolutely wanted what was best for Noah (and she had to remind herself how _lucky_ was she to have found someone who genuinely wanted what was best for Noah), but asked if they could look at houses for sale just for fun, for the sake of a weekend drive. To that, she conceded.

Another opportunity to take the captain’s exam was coming up. Chief Dodds had told her that not enough lieutenants were applying for promotion, and Fin swore if she didn’t sign up, he was going to sign up in her name.

Tucker had never told her no, in fact he never said no to her, but she’d heard enough commentary on her being _married to her job_ (“People say that to me all the time,” Fin had said, “but without the word _married_”), enough jokes about Noah thinking that Lucy was his real mother, to start to think that maybe she should want what Tucker wanted, a quiet married life far from PD, far from the city, far from everything she’d worked so hard to build, because what she’d built at SVU, what she’d changed, was bound to disappear.

Outside the broadcast area from New York City, Benson had hit _scan_ on her car radio in the hopes of finding something new. One station played broken static for thirty seconds, and then the radio switched to the next station, an uncannily familiar tune, clear as day.

“Where do I know this from?” Benson asked out loud, shuddering when she suddenly recalled the same lyrics on Barba’s lips four years ago. 

Tucker laughed at her shudder. “Old boyfriend?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“Must be Cassidy. Pretty recent song.” _Let it go, Ed,_ she thought. “Anyway, you want to stop for —”

“Lunch!” Noah said excitedly. She hadn’t realized he was awake, and hoped he’d slept through Tucker’s off-hand comment about Cassidy. 

“Lunch!” Benson said, echoing his excitement.

_If we’re single and not working together when I’m 50 —_

But she wasn’t single, and even if she and Barba had been meant for something else years ago, she would not break Tucker’s heart. After having her own heart broken too many times, she wouldn’t dare break someone else’s. How could she possibly pull a heel turn on Tucker when so many other people had done exactly that to her?

Besides, who would she leave him for? Barba likely didn’t remember much about that night either. 

Maybe she wasn’t considering leaving him _for_ anyone, maybe she just didn’t want to give in to pressure — that wasn’t coming entirely from him, even though he was talking, talking, talking about big houses on middle-of-nowhere flood plains where you could really save some money thanks to the lower cost of living — to abandon her work at SVU for the sake of _not working so hard_.

But Noah had something stable now too, and for the same reasons she didn’t want to move out to the country, per the Billy Joel version of the American Dream, she wasn’t about to excise Tucker from Noah’s life.

On the other hand, shortly after their most recent visit from Barba, who’d brought him books in English and Spanish and lots of stories, Noah had somehow managed to throw Eddie the Elephant out the window. 

Squeezed the poor little stuffed toy through the child guard, down eight stories onto a subway grate.

He was horrified and cried afterwards, hugging Eddie to his chest after Benson washed him in a pillowcase, so of course he was just playing, but — 

It was a little funny. A little.

—

She’d reminded him _twice_ that her fiftieth birthday was coming up. She’d mentioned retirement at least ten times, coming back to the subject again and again.

She remembered.

_When someone’s looking for an out, give it to them_, he’d been told once, by whom, he couldn’t recall. Maybe it was Benson herself.

Of course it was Benson herself.

Barba had dawdled for a while, snaking through downtown Manhattan to settle his racing thoughts and heart, then returned to Forlini’s, as if he might by some chance see her there again, and when he didn’t see her there, ordered dinner.

At 10, he found himself wandering her neighborhood, wondering if maybe she was simply anxious about turning 50, if he was a horrendous creep to read that as a signal, if the memory embedded in the song was exercising undue influence on him, on his decisions.

He told himself he’d walk past her apartment building, directly to the subway.

When he saw her standing outside in just a T-shirt and sweatpants, he worried, but tried to duck out of her view so he wouldn’t trouble her any more than she already was.

“Rafa.”

He whirled around. Damn her precise trained-detective night vision.

“You checking up on me?”

“You don’t need checking up on.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry, Liv. I misread something you said earlier tonight.”

“You didn’t.”

He stepped back. “Excuse me?”

“It was a few weeks ago, we were driving out to the country, and … come inside for a minute?”

“Okay.” He followed her inside. When they were standing in the lobby, near the elevators, Benson threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly to her. 

“I’d invite you in for a while,” she said, and he could hear that she was crying, which made him want to hold her tighter, to comfort her, to make her a million more promises. “But Ed just left, as in, _just left_, I was standing out there watching him get in a cab, and I don’t want to break his heart, Rafa, I don’t want to break his heart.”

“I understand.”

“I broke your heart too.”

“No.”

“Don’t lie,” she insisted.

“What happened?”

“I asked him to give me more time, and he was fine with that, but we got into a fight over how I don’t want to leave SVU, and I know he’s just arguing for what he thinks his best for me, and I’m sure a thousand other people think —”

He clasped their hands together and drew both to his heart. “Trust your gut,” he said.

She nodded. “Okay.”

“We’ll talk soon. When you’re ready.”

“Yes,” she said, her cheeks now streaked with tears. “I promise.” 

“You promise.”

“I remember.”

“So do I. Far too late, but so do I.”

“I am terrified of breaking his heart, Rafa.”

“Maybe that in itself should tell you something.”

“No, I’m — I need to get back upstairs to Noah. My neighbor knows to look out, but —”

She and Barba still hadn’t broken their embrace.

“I’ll be single on my 50th birthday,” she said. “But —”

“Liv.”

“I need to be single for a while. He’s going to be so mad that I broke his heart, he’s —”

“But not for me,” Barba told her. “You didn’t break his heart for me.”

“No, I did it for _me_, and I’m going to register for that captain exam if Fin hasn’t already signed me up.”

“Good,” Barba said, now emerging from the embrace and pressing his palms to her bare arms, which were ice cold. “You’ll be captain by this time next year.”

She sniffled once and said a quiet “thank you” followed by an “I love you, Rafa. I’ve loved you through our friendship, and that’s something that I’ve never forgotten.”

“I love you,” he echoed, placing a hand over his heart as she disappeared into the elevator.

—

They didn’t quite keep their promise to get married if Benson was single on her fiftieth birthday, but they were married a few months after she turned 51.

They’d waited a long while, first, for Tucker to completely move out, then, for Benson to take the captain exam. On the day she learned she’d passed, she and her senior squad celebrated at her apartment. Barba, who’d of course been invited to join in the celebration, hung back afterwards. He kissed her, they declared their love for each other again, and he never left.

He watched proudly when she was sworn in as Captain Olivia Benson. 

He was even prouder when she began implementing the plan to restructure SVU that she’d been developing for years.

“So when are we getting married already?” she asked him one night. 

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, they said their vows at the New York Botanical Gardens. Barba made promises to her and Noah, and together, they vowed to keep not only all the promises they’d made to each other, but also all the promises they’d made to themselves.


End file.
